And they themselves would do the numbers and work out, well, who am I going to sell this to at the end of the day? That is one of the biggest challenges for these guys, because I actually think there’s a clear demand from many managers in the market for something that’s a bit more upscale, more sophisticated. But who’s going to spend the dollars to actually develop it and then build it, and run the risk that no-one here’s going to buy it because there’s something else available? And that’s where it is a struggle for us. You know, you’re a bit caught between investing in it yourself, which as an accountant, I look at it and say, Well, that’s going to be hard to make stack, versus hoping that you can find alternative service providers available that are going to start delivering what you need.

At Australian Unity we went through this exercise about four years ago. We had a system that we just knew wouldn’t be able to support what we wanted to do, so we did a complete review and replacement of our unit registry in 2005. Are we happy with where we are? I think we are. We do all our administration in-house, but we certainly use outsource technology. At that time we – maybe contrary to the view of fund managers that Chris put forward – certainly sat back and had a look at what we felt what our customers wanted at that point, and where we wanted to compete going forward. We made a choice that we wanted our clients to buy from us on investment performance – in a registry sense it gave us great clarity and simplicity in what we needed to deliver. in a registry perspective.

Pretty much straight managed funds, managed unit trusts. We deviated from that in small respects along the way, but not very much. And I think that’s been very important for us in being able to continue to manage the efficiency side of our business – we’ve got about 40 per cent less admin staff now than we had four or five years ago, and we’re five times the size. We also have our customers having much greater ability to access stuff over the web, stuff that’s fully interfaced, all those sort of things. So, yeah, we’re happy with where we are. We did have a chat to a couple of the custodians at that point, to their credit they just said, ‘Look, it just isn’t worth the investment for us to get it to where you need it to be.’ So it made it a quite simple answer for us. Because I also there is a risk premium in outsourcing something which is core to your value proposition. We’re a largely intermediated business with advisors.